Wednesday, September 28, 2011

In 1997, before Half-Life and before Thief, someone made a mass market medieval-themed puzzle FPS with full voice acting, commandable NPCs and an integrated level editor -- "for ages 8 and up."

You're forgiven if you've never heard of Logic Quest 3D (even MobyGames hasn't) because it's actually a pretty awful game despite its incredibly forward-thinking educational intentions, even by the "you mean we get to play computer games during school?" metric.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

For my master's thesis (no, not Pilsner, though I still like the idea and I'm going to re-work it more as a single player puzzle game) me and my design partners are trying to tackle a Holy Grail of video game design: procedural narrative. We're crazy stupid for trying.

How can a computer generate, whether in-part or in-whole, a meaningful narrative?

Back in 1987, Chris Crawford coined the term "process intensity", or "the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data." Greg Costikyan used this idea to analyze what he argued was the low-hanging fruit, the data-heavy applications the game industry was and still is pursuing, such as more polygons, more shaders and more uncompressed rendered cinematics, etc. He proposed Spore as a new hallmark in procedural generation... then two years later, we all actually played Spore and wanted to forget a lot of it.

I still think the idea is important though, and I want to use it as a lens to analyze approaches to procedural narrative.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Branching dialogues and conversations are very set in their ways. When we do occasionally innovate with them, it's usually to change how to choose an option.

Should we stare at the NPC animations and guess whether they're nervous? Maybe there's a timer, and if we don't choose, the game chooses for us? Perhaps we type a keyword instead of choosing an option. Oooh a dialogue wheel!

Jake Elliott's "Ruins" reaches deep and re-contextualizes branching dialogues more fundamentally: what does a dialogue choice mean? When you choose it, does it mean you're saying the text, verbatim, out loud? Who are you even talking to? In this way, words can summon being. Talk about disappointment, and now the story is about disappointment. Keep mentioning hope, and now the story is about hope. In contrast, BioWare games often treat conversation as a means to explore an exhaustive pre-existing arc and world -- "Garrus, tell me more about Sjao'w'jnga'e!" -- but here, Elliott uses conversation to create the arc itself.

After all, how can Aeris exist if you never talked to her or used her in battle? How can the game narrative possibly hinge on Aeris when she was barely even in it?

Elliott's thoughtful (but never too sentimental) writing suggests giving such games the benefit of the doubt; a ruin could just as easily be the starting shell of a building, he insists, waiting to be filled... Sometimes I fear for people so much kinder than I am.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Games don't kick you out at closing time. Games can withstand flash
photography and direct sunlight. Games don't need to pay people minimum
wage to stand there and protect their integrity. Games want to be touched. Games can be copied so that no one has to wait and everyone can play.

In fact, it seems more like museums have video game envy. They try so desperately to have participatory exhibits with their small ideas of interaction design. Engagement must be something elusive in a building that encourages you to stroll through and then promptly leave so someone else can go in and do the same thing. The whole thing makes gamers laugh because a Powerpoint presentation is a sad excuse for an interactive system, but that's what's on display in half of these "interactive kiosks" in museums. They might use the verb "explore" but really they have no idea what it means.

If games aren't art, it's only because they're already better than art.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

For my thesis, a group project with two fellow students, we're making a first person game. I'm pushing for some sort of first person VVVVVV game, which doesn't seem to have been done yet for some baffling reason (other than that fake video of VVVVVVX floating around!)

Or if it has been a real game, please tell me so I can steal level design ideas!... Doing a simple Mirrors Edge aesthetic for now because we're still in prototyping stages, but we'll probably border on some kind of realism because flat solids are too disorienting right now.

A game with Eddie Cameron for the Super Friendship Club's Mysticism pageant, a top-down-ish tycoon game where you manage a cult in the great American Midwest. Just don't let the FBI catch you!

Modeling stuff for Radiator 1-3. This is Emily Dickinson's lamp, based on a photo from some Harvard online archives. Basically the idea is that all of Emily Dickinson's in-game possessions will be based on her actual stuff. My hope is that eventually an Emily Dickinson scholar plays it and freaks out a little.

Scrapping previous plan for PlanetPhillip's GravityGunVille compo (an Ico-inspired / Chirico / Barragan romp in some ruins) when I realized I had a map with no combat mechanics, and a non-map with combat mechanics, so why not combine the two? Resurrecting an old favorite of mine here. We'll see if I make the deadline.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

I had never seen The Falling Man before today, a photo so iconic of 9/11 and representative of human tragedy, because it was censored so completely. (Both Esquire pieces also persuasively argue against the "think of the children / we don't know who that is but it's someone" argument for banning it.)